SaraEileen.com

I’m writing this because I have been thinking about how people become writers. Most of the people I talk to here in my program seem to have always been writing stories. They will enthusiastically describe their miniature selves, filling notebook after notebook with precocious, adorable prose. I will nod. Sometimes I say, “Oh, me too!” But that is a lie.

The truth is I was not a writer, as a younger child. The truth is that I still don’t know why I made the choices I did.

When I was young, perhaps twelve, I would write erotic stores in a blue and purple book that locked with a little key. I wrote them because they would make my best friend, at the time, laugh with me. I would read them aloud with fake voices. They were mostly about men entering rooms dramatically, wearing ridiculous outfits and carrying whipped cream. I always stopped before the sex, but I remember I taught my then-best friend what a g-string was.

As I grew older, I filled the first three pages of many different, romantic notebooks. I wrote some poetry, perhaps a double handful of poems from thirteen to eighteen. I was not a prolific child of words. Truth be told, I was an artist, and a reader. Writing was just a skill I had, something that made me look smart and came in handy at school.

But the idea of being a writer was very attractive. With all my heart I wanted to be the kind of person who made the kind of books that I loved. I didn’t realize, at the time, that if I wanted to be that person, I needed to be writing.

In the middle of high school I wrote the beginning of a dark erotic fantasy. It had a princess, and a dungeon, and an evil king. It was perhaps two pages long. I wrote it on our family computer, and I was so terrified that someone would find it that I buried the text within a paper I wrote for my Social Studies class. I gave the file the most boring name I could imagine. I never went back to that story, but the experience of writing it and hiding it remains one of my most vivid young memories.

For my senior project as a high school student I decided I wanted to do a project on creative writing. It was my first attempt to ever write a story. I got a month off from classes, and spent most of it out with my friends and starring an an awful amateur movie. I did not write a story. I ended up with a handful of fragments which I later illustrated as a series of prose poems. They were good fragments. They had nothing to do with a story. I just wrote about how I was feeling as I prepared to move to college, and put those feelings together through my (at that time largely innate) skill with words.

When I went to college, I joined too many clubs and took too many classes. I was doing a major in art and a major in English, and I spent most of my time covered in paint with books in my hand. I was not writing creatively, really. And there was no gap in my life where a need to write could have been.

I think sometimes that perhaps I’ve remembered all of this wrong. Perhaps I really was always writing, and I just don’t remember doing so. Perhaps in those various collections of three-page notebooks there is some evidence of a developed interest. I seem to vaguely recall that as a freshman in college I tried to write a play. But I don’t know what happened to those stories.

When I was in my second year of college I started a blog. The truth is that at that point I didn’t care about writing fiction. All I wanted to talk about was the people I knew, the things I noticed, the crafts I was making, the adventures I wanted, and the sex I was or wasn’t having. Of such stuff blogs are made.

I took several creative writing classes as an undergraduate. I took them because I still had the idea that I wanted to be a writer. And also, I took them because they were fun, and easy for me. In these classes I wrote another handful of poems, another handful of prose snippets.

I graduated with the idea of being a writer so firmly entrenched in my psyche that I started applying to writing programs. But I had never written a real story in my life, so I applied as a poet. I was accepted, as a poet, to Emerson’s graduate program. I sat on a warm lawn one morning in the sunlight, thinking about myself and my writing, and realized I had never wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a novel writer.

I did not go to Emerson. I left school with the optimistic, cheerful idea that all I needed to become a real, honest-to-goodness writer, was a little more free time. I would take the summer off, go on a fabulous road trip with my new, beautiful boyfriend. The words would flow. And that was, inevitably, obviously, a lie.

It took a very long time for me to write my first short story. In truth, it took a year and a half. The story is five pages long. It was very hard to write, and very strange, and I worried over it for a long time because it lacked anything resembling a real narrative. It has since been published, and has, remarkably, won a $1000 award. I don’t think anyone who’s read it knows that it was the first story I ever actually wrote.

Then I wrote another story. It took about six months. And then, my two stories in hand and together totaling the bare minimum I would need for a creative writing sample, I applied to writing programs again.

When I wrote my personal statement for my first round of graduate applications, I said a lot of things about wanting to learn how to write. I have gone back and read this statement a few times since then. Everything I said in it was true. But not much of it was honest. It was very polite and ambitious, and mentions how much I loved learning to speak French and do calculus problems.

I wince, sometimes, when I read it.

I left the States for three months, and saw schools in Australia. I loved only one of them. But when I came back and looked at my personal statement, I couldn’t bring myself to send the thing. So I wrote it again. This time it was honest.

I confessed that I had no idea what I was doing. I wrote about the moment of crisis that caused me to back out of my chance at Emerson. I wrote about how hard it had been to try and write independently, and of how spectacularly I had failed to motivate myself. I wrote about my two stories, and how small they were, and how precious they were to me because they were the only things I had.

I closed my new personal statement with a very subtle distinction. I did not, I said, want to learn how to write. I knew how to write. I could put words onto pages, and those words would carry beauty and meaning.

I wanted, instead, to learn how to be a writer. The reality was, I had no idea how to be a writer. I had no idea how to make a story, or finish a novel, or start a novel. I had no idea how to make a career or a work ethic. I was terrified. I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing. But I wanted to be a writer.